When Mom Won’t Let Go; Why This is a Problem
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When Mom won’t let go-
Sometimes mothers look to their daughters for emotional closeness in ways that prevent their daughters from leaving home and making a healthy separation.
When a daughter leaves home and makes a healthy separation from mom and dad ideally she transfers her primary emotional connection from her parents to her partner.
No doubt, leaving and being left is hard for mother and daughter. It involves loss and change for both.
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Mom needs to let go and daughters need to grow up and leave.
Leaving and being left is a necessary developmental task for both the adult daughter and the mom.
Yet, if this doesn’t happen the adult daughter will not be free to invest fully in her relationship with her adult partner.
In other words, in health, she needs to choose her partner over her mother.
This transfer is vital to the health of the newly developed partnership.
It is mom’s job to, let go accept her daughter’s leaving and her choice of a new partner.
It is a daughter’s job to enter into an equal relationship with a peer and leave her role as a child.
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This is the way of healthy development.
Each task has its own challenges and responsibilities.
Leaving home and making a home of your own is the healthy trajectory, one paved with both loss and gratification.
Letting go is the path towards growth.
However, When mothers make their adult daughters feel responsible for their emotional well being, things are topsy-turvy.
Only dysfunction and misery is bound to follow.
When mothers look to their daughters to take care of them emotionally; to be the person they look to for closeness and connection as adults… they place an unnecessary burden on their daughters.
This emotional burden prevents them from making the healthy separation they need to make for themselves.
Here is how this happens –
Transcript
Hi, this is Katherine Fabrizio with help for the Good Daughter Syndrome. One thing I say that my clients talk about that’s, I see that happens really frequently … Many times mom doesn’t have a primary or a good connection with the partner. She may be married. She may be divorced. But in this scenario, many times she’s looking to the daughter for closeness and connection.
Well, why is this a problem? Well, if the daughter is trying to establish their primary connection with their intimate partner, there’s always this tension. Mom’s always pulling the daughter to do things her way.
It’s like a loyalty struggle that’s like of underground, and not really overtly talked about, yet can exert a lot of pressure on the good daughter’s marriage if what she needs to do is to establish her primary connection with her partner.
If mom is suddenly undermining it in some ways because she’s not maintaining her connection with her partner, or actively looking for one. This is Katherine Fabrizio with help for the good daughter who’s struggling with the Good Daughter Syndrome.
A postscript-
It is one thing for a mother and daughter to re-establish closeness after a period of healthy separation. If the period of healthy separation never happens then a genuine adult closeness can never take root.
If a mother clings to her daughter and doesn’t let go- her daughter can’t help but feel growing resentment.
First, mom must let go in order to set the stage for a no strings attached adult relationship with her daughter
This resentment manifests in ways that are ultimately bad for the mother/daughter relationship setting the stage for dysfunction.
Become Aware.
This is how we Rise!
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